Color Crush

Color Crush is an intensive workshop that will fast-track your understanding and ability to use color. Combining her experience teaching color and painting courses at California State University Long Beach, instructor Marie Thibeault will provide students with a deeper understanding of color theory, application and expression. Through a guided process of collage and painted studies, the most essential aspects of color are defined and explored.

Students will reference the history of painting to gain an understanding of how individual color use can enhance and strengthen their own creative work. The group will begin with painted studies and collages that address essential color contrasts, with an emphasis on light, saturation, and proportion of color relationships. These initial composition studies will become the springboard for larger studies tailored to individual needs. By the end of the workshop, each student will become more sensitive to how color creates light, space, focal point, and meaning within their own work, gaining more power with color expression.

Marie Thibeault’s large-scale oil paintings address the tension of urban landscape and the natural world. The imagery is informed by the immediate experience of living near the expansive industrial port of Los Angeles. While referencing the surrounding landscape with atmospheric color fields, the work contrasts industrial structures with organic forms to suggest the ideas of flux, change and instability in the environment.

Thiebeault’s recent solo exhibitions include Weathering at Gremillion fine Art (Houston, TX), Conveyance at the Long Beach Museum of Art, The Feminine Sublime at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Illuminations at Von Fraunberg Gallery (Dusseldorf, Germany), Engineering at George Lawson Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and Broken Symmetries at Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA. She completed residencies at L’Air Arts (Paris, France), Two Coats of Paint (New York, NY) and the US Thai Exchange Program at Silpakorn University (Bangkok, Thailand). Her work has been featured in several publications, including New American Paintings, Artillery Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, and Art in America.

Thibeault received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from University of California, Berkeley.